Literature & Fiction: 5 New Must-Reads

INTO THE SUN (Anansi) by Deni Ellis Bechard

The latest book from Deni Ellis Béchard, winner of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, gives a gritty account of expat life in Kabul ten years after 9-11. The story, which opens with a massive militant attack on a party of expats, delves into the tangled lives of journalists, mercenaries, activists and aid workers who flock to war zones to find purpose and adventure, and a chance to reinvent themselves.

Recently long-listed for the Giller, The Best Kind of People is about an upper class, All-American family thrown into crisis after George Woodbury, husband, father and respected prep school teacher, is arrested for sexual misconduct and attempted rape.

I’M STILL HERE – JE SUIS LA (Grand Central) by Clelie Avit and translated by Lucy Foster

It’s the most unlikely of love stories. Elsa, a woman who has been in a coma for five months, regains partial consciousness but no one realizes it. Even as her family faces the devastating decision of whether or not to take her off life support, a stranger – who happens to be visiting another patient at the hospital — accidentally wanders into Elsa’s room. He alone intuits that she can hear what he says, and thus begins their mysterious connection.

MISCHLING (Random House) by Affinity Konar

Based on real-life Auschwitz survivors Eva and Miriam Mozes, Konar’s Mischling gives a chilling look inside the chamber of Holocaust horrors known as Mengele’s Zoo, where the infamous “Angel of Death” Dr. Josef Mengele conducted grotesque genetic experiments on Auschwitz’s population of twins.

Inspired by his three-month stint practicing frontline medicine in Kandahar in 2007, Patterson’s new novel tells the story of an American war correspondent, Deirdre O’Malley, who is embedded with a Canadian infantry unit in Afghanistan, and her former lover, an American general who oversees the torture and killing of civilians.